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TUX Issue #4 Available

Issue number four, July 2005, of TUX is now available. Subscribers, you can download this issue here or simply follow the Download TUX button on the right to download the current issue. If you're not yet a TUX subscriber, consider subscribing today for instant access to this issue and many more!

I love TUX Magazine! I have recently installed both Linspire Five-0 and SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 on my Athlon 64 desktop system. It's nice to have a magazine that caters to the new Linux user. I have been a long time Macintosh/Windows user, but I am tired of the bloated cost of supporting these platforms. Time for a change! :)

I am totally impressed with what Linux can offer me for my Desktop. Linspire Five-0 is really nice for new users, but I think SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 is the best distribution of Linux for me. I am going to keep both on my HD though... :)

Awesome article! What you say its the pure true, and makes me remember the time when I hadnt grow up and thought piracy was great and open source was like a joke. Unfortunately, thats the belief of many people nowadays; that open source is unnecesary since you can get the pirated version of a commercial app anyways... thats just sad, and a good example that is mentioned in the article is MS Office; my sister preffers to use that pirated version despite Ive asked her to use openoffice.org; she wont just understand my arguments since shes the average PC user...
I dont see other solution to fight back piracy than forcing your known ones to use a open source alternative until they understand why piracy is bad and why open source is so great...

My hat is off to John Knight for saying what I've been saying now for some time.
As a small time free software developer, I cannot tell people just how flattered I am when they tell me that a howto I posted or a script I wrote has been helpful to them. When I write a script, it's there to fill a specific need. If I put some time into the script or think of something clever, I like to put it up for grabs on the web. When someone tells me it was useful to them I'm amazed.
Now think about how a whole team of developers feel when people tell them "OpenOffice saved our school thousands of dollars" or "TrollTech's contributions to the Open Source in the form of Qt has been one of the greatest accomplishments since X11" or "Evolution is a much needed secure alternative to Outlook!" Sure, people complain when something doesn't work exactly the way it was supposed to, which is why you can help by sending polite bug reports! Gnome even automates this procedure.
Now picture the software developer that sees on Slashdot that the product he's worked on for the past year has hit peer to peer networks before they've had a chance to officially release it. Knowing that not a one of those oppurtunistic pirates will submit a bug report. Not a one of them will repay or even appreciate the efforts you've gone through. At least open source developers get hate mail and the occasional thank you note.
Not to mention how software pirates don't even consider the cost benefits of using open source technologies. GIMP/Photoshop, Linux/Windows, OpenOffice/MSOffice, KDevelop/VisualStudio, ClamAV/Norton, Gaim/Trillian, Outlook/Mozilla...the list of alternatives goes on and on. Sure, there's plenty of fantastic commercial software, but is it really so much better than free software it warrants breaking the law? How about a commandment?
Perhaps GNU should develop an unbreakable open DRM system so that people can't pirate software, leading to an uptake in free software ;)

Article on Qt gives an unfair advantage because after publishing and article like that people tend to think highly of that product even when there are other products which are far better than that. Also Qt is not 100% open source. So TUX should publish a review article from at least one other GUI development toolkit such as xWindows or GTK+.

I think that instead of explaining all the other platforms the article should concentrate on one thing at a time. I do think however that an article should focus on one thing since the actual colum doesn't really expand into detail.

On the other side is logical that if the magazine uses KDE primarily development in Qt would make sense. And I think that as long as it's free software there shouldn't be any real favorites. Specially since all of them do the same thing.

I agree, even if its stated that the intention of the article is not to promote QT, in the end, it ends up doing it. Maybe it should have be better to at least include a couple more toolkits in there to balance the article (fox-toolkit and wxwidgets perhaps?)